REGION: San Diego County grants program should be reformed not eliminated, group says

REGION: Program benefits schools, children and the arts, according to SDCTA report

The Board of Supervisors has awarded $66.2 million to various
groups in the county since 2003 through an often-criticized
spending program that some critics say should be scrapped,
according to a report released Monday by the nonprofit San Diego
County Taxpayers Association.

The 43-page report is primarily a statistical analysis of where
the money has been spent and does not address the merits of the
awards. However, the report includes a series of recommendations on
how to improve the program, called the Community Projects Fund,
including making it more transparent.

"The goal (of the report) was to better understand how the
program's funding has been allocated over the years," said Lani
Lutar, president of the San Diego County Taxpayers Association, a
taxpayer advocacy group. "Though some of the grants have been
criticized in the media, there hasn't been a clear understanding of
how the funding, as a whole, has been utilized and where the
dollars were going."

Lutar said that while there were some grants that were likely to
"raise eyebrows," most of the grants were predominantly awarded for
purposes that "most individuals would agree are important in the
community."

Critics of the grant program have called it a "slush fund"
through which supervisors dole out money to political friends. Each
supervisor receives about $2 million a year from the county's
general fund to give out to various programs.

Supervisors have rejected the criticism, saying the program
serves the public good by helping to pay for parks, libraries,
firefighting equipment, educational programs for low-income
children and services for the poor.

"I think the program stands on its own as supporting good work
throughout the region," said John Weil, Pam Slater-Price's chief of
staff.

Problem program?

Supervisor Bill Horn could not be reached for comment on Friday.
However, he defended the program in a recent interview, saying it
helps pay for needed services in his North County district, where
many unincorporated communities are located and where the county is
the only governing body.

"The unincorporated area of the county does not receive its fair
share of sales tax," Horn said. "The people in the unincorporated
areas pay sales taxes, but they don't get any credit for that."

In the past, supervisors have justified the program, saying that
it was a result of their good fiscal discipline, which resulted in
the surpluses that funded it. But the grants have come increasingly
under fire in recent months as revenue from the state and the
county's own coffers shrink.

On Tuesday, the supervisors are scheduled vote on a proposal to
overhaul the program. The proposal is based largely on the
recommendations issued by the San Diego Taxpayers Association's
report.

Lutar said she recently met with several supervisors to present
them with the association's recommendations.

"I especially appreciated that the association took the time to
learn how valued the program is to individual communities,"
Supervisor Dianne Jacob said in a written statement. "It's my hope
that stricter guidelines and more clearly defined criteria will
result in greater overall public confidence in the program."

The association had been among the program's harshest critics.
Lutar has criticized its lack of transparency, including a lack of
clear guidelines on how the grants are awarded, publicized and
listed for public review.

She said the proposed changes would improve the program. The
proposed new rules include publicizing the application process
through each supervisor's Web site and listing the approved grants
on county Web sites.

"In past years, the process of selecting the grant recipients
has been obscure," Lutar said. "(The) new guidelines are an
important step to make the process more open to the public."

Other critics, such as the union that represents county
employees, say the proposed changes don't go far enough.

"These changes are long overdue," said Melinda Battenberg, a
spokeswoman for the Service Employees International Union Local
221, which represents most of the county's 16,000 employees.

"They don't address the heart of the problem: How can the
supervisors spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on sometimes
superfluous community projects at a time when employees are being
laid off and services are being cut?" Battenberg asked.

Laying it out

The report divided the grants into several, broad categories,
including parks, arts, health and human services, public safety,
schools and children's programs and "other."

Of the $66.2 million that have been awarded since 2003, about a
quarter, $16 million, was spent on schools and children's programs,
according to the association's report. About 15 percent, $9.7
million, was spent on parks and another 15 percent, $10.2 million,
on the arts, according to the report.

The largest share was in the "other" category, about 34 percent
or $22.3 million. Health and human services, 10 percent or $6.5
million, and public safety, 2 percent or $1.2 million, made up the
rest of the pie.

The program helps pay for a variety of projects, ranging from
ball parks for kids to community events, such as Escondido's annual
New Year's Eve event, First Night Escondido.

Grants have ranged from $1 million for Otay Valley Regional Park
trail improvements to $2,500 for the Lake Murray Little League to
buy a new scoreboard, according to the association's report.

Typically, groups petition a specific supervisor who then
recommends the grant to the rest of the board at a public meeting.
The rest of the board normally approves a supervisor's
recommendations without much discussion.

Though grants vary widely, each supervisor tends to focus his or
her requests in specific areas of interest.

For example, Jacob tends to focus on schools and parks in her
East County district, while Slater-Price tends to focus on the arts
in San Diego and coastal North County. Horn has given to a variety
of groups in his North County district, such as nonprofit clinics
and public safety organizations.

In North County this year, Horn's grants included $90,000 for
the Palomar Mountain Volunteer Fire Department, $100,000 for the
North County Health Services community clinic based in San Marcos,
and $280,000 for the Valley Center Heritage Trail, according to the
report.

Criticism

In 2005, the program was criticized for sloppy accounting
practices. The program came under scrutiny again a year later when
it was revealed that Roberts and Slater-Price took expensive trips
that were paid for by organizations that had received the
grants.

At various times, critics have called on the supervisors to
scrap the program. Critics have suggested the money could instead
help boost pay for home care providers, buy firefighting
helicopters, lease firefighting airplanes and keep county employees
from being laid off.

For example, former county supervisor Lou Conde, who served from
1972-76, referred to the grant programs as slush funds several
times at board meetings in 2004 as supervisors debated where to get
$3.5 million to buy firefighting helicopters.

Conde challenged the board to go into its "slush funds" to pony
up the money for the helicopters from the grant program.

The county grand jury investigated the grant program in 2005
because a confidential complaint accused the program of being a
taxpayer-funded fund for supervisors to buy political favor.

However, in a report issued later that year, the grand jury
rejected that claim, saying "there is no evidence to support
misconduct or misuse of the funding allocations."

For the full report, visit the San Diego County Taxpayers
Association's Web site: www.sdcta.org.